21.41: Barrier Breaking- Physical Fatigue

Queuing up tasks for tired writers

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 41.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Barrier-breaking physical fatigue. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Lan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And I'm here to talk to you about being so tired you can't even, can't even. And what you do in order to can even maybe just a little bit. I'm going to begin by sharing an anecdote I've shared in the past. My good friend Dave had a coding technique where in the morning he would go in and he would look at all the test reports

0:55and look at all the, you know, project spec documents and he would sit down and instead of writing code, he would look at each of the tasks and write down what it was, what libraries need to be accessed, what code calls likely need to be, and he would stick it to his monitor. And then all morning when he was fresh, he would work like that and surround his monitor with sticky notes. And then he'd go to lunch, put himself into a predictable food coma, come back to work, sit down at his desk, stare at the monitor and think,

1:27I don't know who sat here this morning, but they're really smart. I don't know how any of this works. And he'd stare at the post-it notes and he'd pick one up and look at it and he'd think, oh, oh, I can do that. And he'd stick it next to his keyboard and then he'd just start typing, go get the code library, go get whatever else, finish it and think, okay, I did a thing. Oh, there's more junk on my monitor. What's this? Oh, oh, I can do that. And he would make his way around his monitor.

1:58Sometimes he finished the day and there were lots of sticky notes left, but he never finished a day without having made a list of things that maybe a future smarter version of himself could come back and fix. And I have applied that to my workflows. And now that I have chronic fatigue, I have learned all kinds of things about how important it is to queue up stuff for tired Howard. And I think that's really an important thing to talk about here is that you are not the same writer every day.

2:36And whether you have chronic fatigue or whether you are just dealing with situational fatigue, you're a different writer every single time you sit down to write. So having a wide variety of tools to acknowledge the brain that you have when you sit down. It's very easy to have said, oh, boy, that was a really great writing day. It'll always be like this because I figured it out now. And that's not the way it works. Totally. I mean, I'm very guilty of running into these problems. I don't have chronic fatigue, but I do have chronic doing too much.

3:09I'm always adding extra projects. I'm always trying to do too many things, fit in too much social stuff, fit in too much travel, all the work, taking on too many projects. You know, I know we're here spending a week recording writing excuses. We do a bunch of these in a row. It's going to be a very intense week. And in my head, I'm like, well, I'm driving back on Sunday, Monday. Here's a list of things that I got to get done. And it's a very long list of complex tasks that need to be addressed. And I can see myself making the mistake I always make, which is I'm going to be fine.

3:44I can push through. I can show up. But you're right. I'm not going to be the same person I would be if I had taken a few days to rest beforehand. I don't know what to do about this because for me, there's a lot of pressure to address all the things that are on my list. There's a lot of things that need to happen. And I'm doing too much. This reminds me of, like, what I like to call, like, 4 or 5 a.m., Erin, who is usually, like, let's say, very tired at this point. And there's a point where I'm trying to push through getting work done, whatever it is.

4:15But I'm, like, falling asleep. I'm extraordinarily slow. The work isn't that good. But for some reason, it's like I can't stop because if I stop, then, like, I haven't accomplished the tasks that I wanted to do for the day. So it's like I have to push through, push through, push through. And what I found is that, honestly, half the time just saying, okay, I'm going to go to sleep for two hours. And, like, I will wake up. It will still be very early, 6 a.m. But in that two hours, I will actually get enough brain cells regenerated that I can actually push through and do this work better.

4:49And I will do in the two hours, if I'd stayed awake, I would have gotten very little low quality, very little work done and low quality. Like, yes, those two hours are away, but I needed that to rejuvenate. And it could be two hours. It could be 12 hours. It could be six weeks. Whatever it is for you. But I think we can often, when we're in the push through mindset, believe that we can, like, outgain fatigue. But fatigue is physical. And, like, you can't beat it just by thinking your way through it. Yeah, we talk about this in theater a lot, about the point of diminishing returns. And it's like, I'm doing poor quality work slower than if I took a break.

5:26And sociologists have studied this for people in the workforce, that actually shorter work days, fewer work days, you get more work done. But we don't do that when we're writing. And a lot of times we don't, we also don't have a choice sometimes. If you are someone who is dealing with chronic fatigue or any other form of chronic illnesses, you have to be able to push through it.

5:59If you're doing caretaker stuff, if you want to be able to write and do caretaking, a lot of times you do have to be able to push through. I think the thing I would counsel, though, is that if you can take the break, take the break. That's going to be the best thing for you.

Planning ahead in the kitchen

6:16I want to offer another example. I love to cook. And the way our kitchen is currently laid out, I have to walk around one end of the counter in order to put things away, in order to get things out. And so planning for cooking always begins with mise en place, always begins with getting all the ingredients, all the tools, all the everything into one spot. But I recognize that when I'm cooking, I'm also making a mess. And somebody's going to need to clean this up.

6:47And doing the dishes is a huge effort. Putting things away is less of an effort, but it's still kind of an effort. So while I'm cooking, I'll think to myself, all right, am I done with this spice? I'm done with this spice. It's eventually going to need to be carried all the way around to the other side of the room. But instead of doing that, I'm just going to shove it to the far side of the counter to tell myself, at some point, when you're on the other side of the counter, maybe just pick this up and put it closer to where it goes.

7:19I don't even need to put it away. I just need to put it closer to where it goes. And I will finish with a cooking project. And I've made food for myself. It's delicious. I'm happy. I don't want to put anything away. But everything is a little bit closer to where it needed to go. And maybe on my next pass through the kitchen, there will be enough of me where I'll walk in and say, Oh, those things, I didn't. And it's only three steps. If you have chronic fatigue, you know how expensive three steps can be. But I have the three steps now. I will go ahead and move them.

7:49And so planning to be tired, planning to only have one nerve cell left, you know, only one firing neuron, and cueing something up so that that one neuron is all that's required in order to do that one thing, that skill has saved me. That makes me think about, Mayor Rebnett, what you said about, like, you know, sometimes you can't take the break. And so I think it's figuring out what is your, what is the best condition that you can give for your tired self?

8:22Like, what is the thing that works best for you? For me, when I cannot take breaks, I find often that physically standing at the computer, it's harder to fall asleep when you're standing. It's possible, definitely. But it's harder for me, at least. And so sometimes I'll just stand over my keyboard because I'm like, okay, at least this way, like, I will be awake-ish to get this done. And maybe that will get me to, like, the point that I need to get. And for somebody else, it could be something completely different. But the way I did that was, like, when I was really tired, I would be like, okay, let me try this.

8:55And this didn't work. Okay, next time, let me try something else. And eventually you end up sort of figuring out how to game yourself a little bit for the person you at least are in this moment.

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Falling back on craft when tired

11:03All right, we're back. Years ago, Mary Robinette and I were talking about something, and I forget exactly what it is, but we talked about the fact that the inspiration had fled, brain was just too tired, and we had to fall back on craft. And I want to talk about what that actually means. When your brain is just too tired to be inventive, what does it mean to fall back on craft?

11:35So, I do a ton of placeholders and lists and iterations.

11:44So, you know, I know how a story is built, and so sometimes it's like, bad thing happens here. And I can mark that down, and then later I can be like, all right, now I can do like a list of 20 possible bad things that can happen. Um, sometimes it is, uh, I can do dialogue today and description is not in my wheelhouse. Other days it's like, I can describe a room, but I'm not going to be able to do any plot. And so I will use the craft that is available to me that day to do the work that I can do that day with the energy that I have.

12:22And that's, that's one of the things that, for me, falling back on craft is about, is that, that it's not, I have to write and it all has to be perfect the first time. It's like, no, on a bad brain day, on a, that's, that's not a, that's not how that works. That's one of the most important things that, uh, I need to remember when I'm that tired is, uh, good writing is rewriting and not writing is not good writing.

12:53And so if, if I'm, if there's just enough of me to write a few really clumsy ham-fisted words that kind of say what I was thinking, I'll write a few clumsy ham-fisted words and, and come back and rewrite it better later. I'm, um, I've been, for the past couple of weeks, um, I've been dealing with a lot of fatigue that is largely self-induced, um, because I, I have to narrate audio books, um, and, uh, teach and supposed to be writing.

13:33Um, so it's all, it's all self-induced, like this is, this is a scheduling issue, but I have to work through that scheduling issue. Um, and so my work in progress right now has really bad argument that goes here. And one of the lines is, you suck. No, you suck. It's not going to be that later, but it gets me my emotional beats. And it, it's the same thing. That's good enough for a lot of TV scripts. I mean, you know. You could work for the CW.

14:02But it is, I think that if you look at the rest of your, your, if you look at your non-writing life, the tools that you use in your non-writing life to get work done that you don't have the energy or don't want to do, you can apply to your writing life. Like, knowing what, what makes it easier for you to work. Cueing things up. Is it, like, challenges? Is it rewards? Is it praise? Like, you can cue those things up. Is it making lists? Bringing things into smaller pieces. You can use all of those for writing.

14:33Well, I think one of the toughest things in all of this is shifting expectations. You know, I do not have the same capacity to operate on low sleep that I did when I was in my 20s. I'm in my 40s. It is way harder to do that. If I push myself or if I have insomnia or if I've been traveling, it just, I can't do the things that I used to do. And so my benchmark is still set from when I was 25 and could do all the things and operate in certain ways.

15:05And now I simply can't, right? But it's, my brain has been slow to adapt to that, slow to shift my expectations, right? Wait until you're in your 50s and have a great time. Can't wait. Can't wait. But that's the thing. It's as your life moves and progresses, these things change. As the structure of your life changes, all of these things. One of the things that I realized within the past couple of years was that I, all of the writing advice that I had heard and much of it that I had regurgitated was around productivity. Yeah. And realizing that there's a difference between a productivity goal and a satisfaction goal.

15:37And that what I'm, what I'm, I'm writing to feel satisfied, to, to be like, to, to create something that makes me happy in some way. And that the productivity goals are in service of the satisfaction goals. So, I started doing two things. One was making a list of satisfaction goals that would make me happy before I sat down. So, shifting that expectation. It's not, I'm going to try to do 2,000 words. It's like, I'm going to try to get them to kiss today. And then the other thing that I did, and this is just within the last couple, last month, maybe, maybe two months.

16:14I was talking with one of my writing students about the fact that she had forgotten how to have fun with the writing. And I made a bingo card. And when we, this is not going to be your homework, but I'm going to put it in the liner notes. It will generate a new and different bingo card for you every time, which includes things like, open the document, or a smell. And so, you can use it either as, hey, I did this thing, recognizing a thing you did, or you can use it as a series of prompts.

16:45But it was just this external reminder of, we write because it's fun. And if you are writing through fatigue and it's not fun, take a break. If you want to be able to write and it is fun for you and you are fatigued, that's when you reach for the tools that we're talking about. Yeah, and I was actually thinking of a very small version of this and, like, ways to put joy, I think, is the way I'm thinking about it. Ways to put joy in the writing is, you were talking about placeholders earlier, and a colleague of mine was telling me a very cool thing,

17:16which is that you can, in Microsoft Word, make spellcheck, take anything you write, and decide. Like, spellcheck basically is like, hey, you did this very common misspelling. I will correct it with this common spelling. But you can train it to take any series of things that you write and replace it with whatever you want. So, you can be like, every time I write XXXX, it's going to replace it with, insert cool place here and highlight it blue, which is, like, a very fun way if you're typing things a lot and you know that you're going to replace them. But a lot of times, I'll use that to put really fun placeholders in.

17:48So, I'll be like, a dude. But when I write a dude, it will replace it with, like, fun guy. And then, like, I'm like, oh, fun guy is, like, mushrooms. Like, whatever thing it is that I think will make me smile at four in the morning when I'm writing it. And then when I go back and look at it, it's not like, oh, I failed to put this in. It's like, oh, look at all those silly placeholders that I put in that I get to replace. And it makes it feel, like, more like, what do I get to do versus what do I have to do? But that is just, like, also just a really fun thing is to use spellcheck as a tool that you are putting into the world versus one that is being imposed upon you.

18:22I love that you just turned your entire manuscript into your own Mad Lib.

Recognizing physical and mental limits

18:25I want to take a moment for, you know, the only term I can think of right now is PSA. When we were younger, and I know when I was younger, it was critically important to find out what my limits were and to learn to push past them. And, you know, you work out until failure. That was really common and healthy and helpful for me when I was younger.

19:03If you suffer from chronic fatigue, that approach is deadly no matter what age you are. Because every time you push to failure, you make the next failure worse. Which is why when we talk about working through fatigue, if you suffer from, you know, diagnosed chronic fatigue or suspect that it's actually chronic fatigue, M-E-C-F-S, you know, you do some searching and figure out if this is you, figure out where the failure point is and always fall short of that.

19:43Never, never push to failure. I've heard, you know, spoon theory described as, you know, oh no, I'm out of spoons. Chronic fatigue is when the final spoon is attached to the pin of a grenade, and if you use that spoon, you've destroyed the next day or the next week. Well, it's a really important concept in working out of if you are doing heavy lifting, if you are lifting to failure, it's really, really important to understand that that is under controlled conditions. You're doing it very deliberately, very specifically, with a very specific form.

20:16And my problem with things like CrossFit, for example, is you're pushing to failure under uncontrolled conditions, right? And that is what leads to injury. The other thing I'm going to point out is a lot of people like to talk about the brain like it's a muscle. Like our internal mental energy and fatigue has the same kind of adaptability as our physical muscles, and that's just not true. They are different systems that operate differently. Sometimes that metaphor can be useful, but can also lead you down very dangerous roads, because even if you don't have chronic fatigue,

20:46pushing your mental limits over and over again doesn't lead to hypertrophy and growth. It leads to burnout, and those are really different things. That is very true, but I will say thinking about gyms and CrossFit and all these things makes me think that it's really important when you lift heavy to have a spotter. And I think in life it is good to have spotters as well, people who will recognize when you are burning out, who are not you and can help you. Because a lot of times when you're in the moment, it doesn't feel like you're burning out.

21:17It feels like, I could just push through and use that last spoon. What could happen? And it's good to have somebody who is able to say, okay, this is like you're going too far. It's great if you can have that externally. If you don't have someone externally, sometimes it's good to write down a list of lies I tell myself right before I burn out. You know what I mean? So that if you put it on your fridge, so that if you feel yourself telling yourself one of those lies, go, oh, wait, maybe it's time for me to take a break and see if this is a lie and if I am pushing myself too far.

21:48But whether you spot yourself by setting up things ahead of time or have somebody else spot you, sometimes it's hard to get outside of your own head, and it's good to have a way to do that. That to me sounds like it's time for a new tattoo. I got to get that where I can see it. Because, boy, do I not listen to those signs. Yeah. One of the most important things I learned was actually how to spot my symptoms before they became a real problem, which is another thing that you can actually do. So, you know, the people who have, like, these spreadsheets, and it's like, I do this and it turns green when I hit my threshold goal.

22:26So I use a thing called pacemaker.press. Love it. Which I probably did learn from you, Erin. But one of the things that I like about it is that no matter what you put in on that day, it gives you confetti and congratulations and it turns green. And the other thing, the extra piece of that is that what I can do is I can look at it and go, oh, my actual pace is this. My actual pace during something, you know, a really busy time is like 200 words.

23:02Good day. Got anything done. So instead of saying, okay, I'm really going to have to make up for it by writing 10,000 words because I only did 200 the other day, I can say, well, what happens, what does the schedule look like if I write 200 words a day? If I shift my expectations based on my actual capabilities. And the other thing that it does is that on the days where I do have, like, 1,500 words, I'm like, what was different that day? What did I, you know, what was it that I knew where the story was going?

23:34Um, was I not fatigued that day? Like, what, what was it in, are those conditions that I can set for myself on another day? I run a, uh, uh, run an app on my phone that monitors my health. I have a, uh, polar, uh, always on heart tracker on my arm and, uh, the app and the service serve to help me see when I'm overdoing it. And I have learned some amazing things.

24:05Standing up and giving a presentation for me, uh, spikes my heart rate hard and, and my exertion numbers, according to the budget that the app and I have decided I have, uh, are, you know, I'm spent for the day.

Homework on writing through fatigue

24:19Um, and I, I learned that and now I know that and now I can plan for that and I think we're ready for homework and the homework is going to tie right into what we've been saying. I want you to write down five things. The first three things are things, are, are writing tasks that you think you can perform when you're, when you're just really tired. When all you've got left in you is, is 10 words, if that, what are the 10 words you can type?

24:56You know, can you, can you take, uh, Aaron's trick and write dude, and it gets replaced with fun man with glistening abs or whatever. Those weren't Aaron's words. I know, but that's what I was thinking. Um, so three things that you can do and two things that you recognize are symptoms in you of when you're about to burn out or like, again, like Aaron said, the lies you tell yourself that are going to make you keep going when you can't write down those five things.

25:34And just keep them close at hand and see if they will help you get a little bit done when you can't even, can't even. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

25:54Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.